Catriona reached over and lifted Fox by the scruff.
He made his position on this clear, loudly, and she set him down to the side of the stall with a firm look that he returned with complete indifference.
Behind her, she heard Fergus shift. He'd drifted closer again, drawn by the two women a few stalls over who had beenwhispering behind their hands for the past several minutes and were making increasingly little effort to be subtle about it.
She heard him take the half-step forward that put him at her shoulder.
She stepped sideways and nudged him back with her elbow. "Ye hover worse than a storm cloud."
"Orders," he muttered.
"The orders were to stay within sight. Ye're within earshot."
"Same thing."
"It isnae."
Iona's mouth had developed a twitch at the corner that it was fighting to contain.
She watched the two of them for a moment with the expression of a woman who had been observing people long enough to know what she was looking at, even when the people in question had not yet arrived at the same conclusion.
"Aye," she said, dryly, to no one in particular. "The Dragon guards what he values."
Catriona picked up her basket and turned from the stall with the smooth, unhurried movement of someone who had not heard a word of that.
She walked at the same pace she'd arrived, Fox falling in at her heel, Fergus taking up his customary position two paces behind.
The warmth that had crept up her neck was not fear. She knew what fear felt like, it sat low and cold and made the hands careful.
This was something else entirely, something that moved upward rather than downward, that had no useful function she could identify and no business being there at all.
She attributed it to the cooking fires. There were several nearby. It was a perfectly reasonable explanation, and she intended to keep it.
She kept walking and did not look back.
CHAPTER NINE
"They call him Dragon."
She said it to the road ahead, not to Fergus.
The market noise had fallen away behind them, replaced by the sound of their boots on stone and Fox's light tread through the heather beside the path.
The keep sat on the hill in front of them, the same as it always looked from this angle. Heavy, certain, entirely itself.
"Aye," Fergus said.
She kept walking. "Why?"
A pause.
She heard him scratch his beard, the sound of a man weighing how much of a question to answer.
"Because he survived fire when others didnae."
She slowed. Not stopping, just slowing, her feet finding their own caution.
"Others." A beat. "Others like the boy's parents?"
